High Carbon Steel Filipino Balisongs Butterfly Brass with Stainless Steel with Water Buffalo Horn Black Mamba Knives World Class Knives | BMK-580

Description

This is the serpentine one. The blade waves along its full length before it settles into a symmetrical spear point, and it is cut from a genuinely layered billet, so the flowing bands in the steel run with the curves instead of across them. Handles are polished steel bolsters carrying near-black water buffalo horn, pinned with copper.

Water buffalo horn behaves like a fingernail

That is not a turn of phrase. Horn and fingernail belong to the same material family, keratin, and the practical consequences follow from it. Horn is tough and very slightly flexible where bone is brittle and simply breaks. It takes a polish down to a deep near-black shot through with brown and gray streaking that belongs to that one animal and no other. And it gives moisture up to dry air, so a knife left in a heated room all winter can develop fine surface checking on the panels. A drop of mineral oil worked in with a cloth once or twice a year prevents that outright. If the horn gets soaked, let it dry in its own time and never speed it along with heat.

Two different corrosion stories in one knife

The blade is layered carbon, oil tempered into the mid-to-high fifties on the Rockwell scale. The frame around it is stainless. A decade from now the handles will look much as they do on the day they arrive and the blade will not, unless you have been paying attention to it. That mismatch catches people out, which is why it is worth reading what actually happens to layered steel over time before you decide where in the house it is going to live. Nothing here is delicate. It simply is not uniform, and the two halves want different things from you.

The horn sits in a channel, it is not the structure

The panels are set into the steel frame rather than forming it, which is the arrangement balisong handle construction favors for a good reason: a knock off a tabletop lands on metal, not on the organic material. Copper pins hold each panel and are peened flush by hand. Whoever fits them also cleans up the boundary where horn meets steel, because that seam is the first thing a buyer runs a thumbnail over.

Sharpening a waved edge

Plan for it. A bench stone reaches the high points of the curves and nothing else, so the hollows need a rod or the corner of a stone worked patiently. Most owners of this model touch up the crests and leave the rest alone for years, which is perfectly reasonable on a knife that spends its life rotating rather than cutting rope.

Made in Memphis

Ground, hardened, fitted, sharpened and function-tested in Tennessee, then sent out with a hand-sewn black leather carrier, riveted and strap-closed. If pale panels appeal more than dark ones, the same frame is offered with bone inserts. Local law on this style is worth ten minutes of your time before you buy. The guarantee runs for life either way.

Model: BMK-414